Big Doings on Smith Street — Not All Good (8 pix)

New houses have been popping up like mushrooms all over the Central Ward, but my neighborhood, Vailsburg, in the West Ward, had seemed pretty stable. No longer.
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On Monday, I walked to get some test results (cholesterol and such) from Dr. Patel on Sanford Avenue, about 4 blocks away, past two construction sites. Then I walked to the post office for 2-cent stamps and then across the street to Komishane's Pharmacy at Stuyvesant and 18th Avenues. I was able to get my prescription, but their lottery machine was out. So rather than heading directly home, I walked back uphill to Sanford and then across to Silver Street (the far end of my block) to Gomez Supermarket for lottery tix (one each for the Monday and Tuesday drawings). As I walked down the short slope to Smith Street (mine) I noted something I'd never noticed before. There's a new house just beyond the two trees that bloom so brilliantly in the springtime that I chose that scene as the second picture for my Newark website.

Note that the house you can just barely see past the trees has windows. Compare this photo, taken yesterday.

Note that there are now no windows on the wall beyond, and that the building goes much farther back to the left. (I see a lot of windowless walls in new construction in Newark.) Maybe this new house was built during the summer, when the trees are so full that you don't notice anything beyond.
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There was no construction activity on Monday due to the rain. The excavation mid-block was a shallow, odd-shaped lake, but Tuesday the workers were able to pump out the water, and this is what I saw.

I then walked toward the corner of Smith and 18th Avenue. Before I got there, I saw workers moving a window into place. Tho I was beyond ideal range, I took this picture to capture the moment.

Note the pickup truck under the window at issue. It comes into the story shortly.
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I reached the corner and took a closer shot of the two houses going up 5 feet apart on 18th Avenue at Smith Street.

A man sitting in the pickup called to me, smiling. It turns out he is the owner/builder, John (?) Amaral (I'm better with last names than first), who used to live 3 blocks south of 18th Av. He now lives in Sussex County but is investing in the old neighborhood.
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As we chatted about the changes in Newark and his project in particular, his workmen started to move another big window into place, and this time I got an action shot.

Amaral is optimistic about his buildings, in that they are less than a block from the No. 1 bus, which heads right Downtown, stopping at Newark Penn Station, then proceeding thru the Ironbound and on to Journal Square in Jersey City, linking New Jersey's two largest cities with one bus.
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From Newark Penn, the PATH carries commuters expeditiously to Downtown Manhattan via downtown Jersey City, or thru Greenwich Village and Chelsea to Herald Square; NJTransit trains zip to New York Penn in 20 minutes; and the 108 bus reaches the Port Authority Bus Terminal in a half hour. Alternatively, the 107 bus connects southern Vailsburg and Irvington to the Port Authority directly. And, as the start to today's blog entry should indicate, you can easily walk to many local businesses when work doesn't take you out of the neighborhood.
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When I heard that the builder's name was Amaral, I asked if it was Spanish. Nope. Portuguese. Very good!
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Newark has the largest concentration of Portuguese-speakers outside of Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) countries, and I mentioned that I've been hoping for an influx of Portuguese and Brazilians to other areas of the city than the Ironbound. I asked if he was doing advertising in Luso-Americano, a Portuguese-language newspaper founded in Newark in 1928. He said no, but the real-estate broker who is handling his buildings does speak Portuguese.
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I commented on what he plainly appreciated, that this is a great location for Portuguese families or groups of singles. A cluster of friends could live in Vailsburg all along the No. 1 route and just hop on one bus to head to the Ironbound for parties and special occasions.
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I told him I want to draw people in from Manhattan who would be very happy to get out of the crammed-jammed life in exorbitantly expensive Manhattan or even the overpriced Outer Boros. Amaral's two houses will each have a garage and utility room on the ground floor, complete with washer and dryer, and I know Manhattanites are sick of laundromats and having to dance to somebody else's tune. I can do laundry at 3 o'clock in the morning if I want to (and I often do). I don't have to sit around and wait, for fear that somebody will move (or steal) my clothes or I'll lose a sock that sticks to the side of the drum.
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He said that the price differential between even Newark and Jersey City is striking. Each floor of his houses contains 1,250 square feet. In JC, he says, each floor might be sold as an apartment to itself. His houses offer two and half floors plus garage for a tiny fraction of the square-foot cost of housing in Jersey City, much less Manhattan.
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Mr. Amaral also told me why there are so many windowless walls now. Newark's building code requires at least 3 feet of clearance between buildings for windows. His two buildings are 5 feet apart, which means that one of them can have windows on the wall between but the other cannot! So the one on the right has windows; the one on the left has none on the inner wall. I suppose people who have lots of paintings, prints, or family fotos to display might like that. I, however, really like having windows on all four sides of my house.
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Speaking of windows, here's what the house on the right looked like after the workmen aligned the new window.

Alas, even this usually very safe neighborhood has its urban ills, chief among them drugs and associated crime. I'm sorry to report that as I was working on this blog entry, I heard a loud knock at my door just before 1 a.m. It was a young policeman who wanted to know if I'd heard any gunshots! I told him I did hear one loud noise, a couple of hours earlier, I thought, tho I wasn't paying attention. I'd have no way of knowing if it was a gunshot — what do I know about gunshots? — nor where it might have come from, or if it was just a firecracker, which one does sometimes hear around here, but usually in the days leading up to the Fourth of July.
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It turns out that not 300 feet from my front door, some black kid in his 20s, probably involved in the drug trade, was shot dead by a single shot to the back of the head in the middle of the street. Now that I think about it, it occurs to me that maybe he was brought by car from another neighborhood to some quiet, out-of-the-way place, forced out of the car at gunpoint, and then shot dead by people who have no connection with this neighborhood whatsoever but were just looking for a quiet place, away from prying eyes, where they wouldn't be recognized even if they should be seen.
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These things happen in every major city of this country, tho this is the first time a killing has happened on my block in the 5½ years I've lived here. I've waited for the bus or walked home from the bus at nite with no problem. Jersey City alternates with Newark and New York on the local news for stories about violent crime. New York has all New Jersey cities put together beaten by a wide margin. And, as I told the cop, the only way things ever get better is if new people move into an area and demand change. Too many urban neighborhoods have become complacent about crime. Newark is working hard on moving the drug trade out of this city, and, as I write, there are a bunch of police cars and cops investigating this extremely unusual incident. They've brought in brite lites to illuminate the scene so they can look for evidence without waiting for daybreak.

When I lived on 46th Street, in Hell's Kitchen (Manhattan), there was a fatal shooting in broad daylite on 44th Street, same block crosstown. At least this shooting was in the 'dead' of nite.
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I want good people to invest in and move to Newark, but I want them to do so with the clear understanding that no city in the Northeast — or much of any other part of this country — is safe from crime.
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Oddly, the episode of Roseanne on Nick at Nite that is running as I write concerns a burglary of the house nextdoor to Roseanne and Dan, in the mythical small city of Lanford, Illinois.
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Neither Newark nor even Lanford is Mayberry (tho, now that I think about it, there was one famous episode of the Andy Griffith Show in which the state police descend upon Mayberry to catch an escaped convict, whom 'hick' sheriff Andy outwits while the state police look on uselessly). Nor is Jersey City, Mayberry. Nor, most pointedly, is New York.
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If I'm going to live in a city — and I'm not a Mayberry kind of guy, so I definitely am going to live in a city — I want to live in a house of my own that I can easily afford, a home surrounded by trees, flowers, veggies, and herbs I can put in or take out.
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When I lived in New York, I lived in Hell's Kitchen, zip code 10036, which I found reasonably safe. I tried to compare crime rates to my new zip code, 07106, but the website I found showed 10036 to be comparable in crime to some of the worst neighborhoods in Manhattan, so I couldn't trust any comparison at that site. I had to rely upon my instincts, honed by 35 years living in Manhattan. In 10036, I could afford at best to rent a one-bedroom apartment with windows on one side. In 07106, I could afford to own a three-story house with windows on all sides. I'll take 07106 any day, one serious crime every 5½ years or not.